June 2006
By Clive Parker/Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh
Burmese refugees in Bangladesh are running out of options
Iman Hussein does not officially exist. But standing less than 100 feet from the Naff River which separates his makeshift refugee camp in the Chittagong Division of Bangladesh from his homeland of Arakan State in Burma, he says there are more pressing concerns for his group of 14,000 refugees: “We are just hoping for assistance,” he says.
In Dhaka, the Ministry for Food and Disaster Management has yet to permit the UNHCR refugee agency to register this group of Rohingyas, thereby denying them food and medical aid. The Burmese Ambassador to Bangladesh, Thane Myint, does not even recognize the Rohingyas as an ethnic group.
“Many people are claiming they lived in Rakhine [Arakan] State a long, long time ago,” he says, chuckling. “Some of them are, or have been, living in Myanmar [Burma]. Some of them may not be [from Burma].”
The Bangladesh government says there are just over 20,000 Burmese people in the area—the number registered officially with UNHCR in two refugee camps south of Cox’s Bazaar. But the Burmese embassy in Dhaka recognizes only 10,000 as citizens of Arakan State. There are many more Buddhist Burmese refugees living illegally in Bangladesh. Those interviewed by The Irrawaddy—both Buddhists and Muslims—gave the same reason for leaving their homeland: they were fed up with human rights abuses inflicted by the Burmese military government.
“Shouldn’t the [Bangladeshi] government ask the question, ‘Why are they here?’ Instead, they ignore the problem,” says Jim Worrall, the head of UNHCR’s Cox’s Bazaar office which overseas nearby Kuta Palong refugee camp and further south, Nayapara.
Worrall says the group of Rohingyas on the bank of the Naff River—the most urgent case—needs “a political solution before we [UNHCR] can do anything for them.”
But despite serious differences of opinion, Bangladesh and Burma only recently discussed the issue for the first time at the foreign ministry level, when Bangladesh’s Foreign Secretary Hemayetuddin visited Rangoon in May. Both sides agreed on a statement of intent to resolve the issue, but a plan of action is yet to be developed.
In a clearing among huts made of filthy plastic and bamboo cane, the unregistered refugees in the camp vent their anger in a huddled group. Some say they have been in Teknaf, Bangladesh, for nearly 15 years after fleeing repression in northern Arakan State. UNHCR has promised they will eventually be registered, but nothing has happened yet. Everyone is their perceived enemy—the UNHCR, the Bangladeshi government, the locals, but especially the Burmese government.
Thane Myint says claims of the systematic violation of Rohingya rights in Arakan are a fabrication designed to generate sympathy in the international community so that the refugees will find homes abroad. And there is some evidence of Bangladeshis managing to fake a Rohingya identity in a bid to escape the poverty of rural Bangladesh for the developed West—one Burmese says he met such people in Belgium when he recently lived there for three years.
The refugees by the Naff River, however, say their plight is very real: “I want to live peacefully in my land, Arakan, but whatever we do the soldiers take it away,” says a 30-year-old Rohingya woman, Kalaban Nor, angrily.
The group says it has suffered harassment in Bangladesh. Some recount how their previous camp, a few miles away, was burned down two years ago in the middle of the night, injuring a number of children. The authorities have never established how the fire was started, but those in the camp say they suspect local Bangladeshis.
In their current settlement right next to the Naff River they face a different threat—every year between May and October the river regularly bursts its banks and flows into the camp. Most have been lucky enough to move to drier ground. Some have drowned.
Their plight has caused so much concern within UNHCR and the European Commission office in Dhaka that both have regularly visited the site in the past year, issuing strongly worded statements condemning the Bangladeshi government for its refusal to allow the refugees outside help. The EC raised the issue during a bi-annual meeting with the Bangladeshi authorities in March but admits “a solid long-term solution to the plight of the refugees has not yet been fully established.”
Although these refugees do not receive any financial or food aid, medicine or education, they do at least have something missing from their lives in Burma: democracy. They are able to choose their seven leaders, or Mahjees. Officially registered Rohingya refugees in the two camps in Chittagong Division are not afforded the same luxury. Despite repeated protests by refugees in both Kuta Palong and Nayapara camps, their Mahjees are still appointed by the local authorities. These appointees have been accused of inflicting severe physical abuse on camp members.
“This camp is like a jail,” says a 21-year-old man from Kuta Palong who refused to give his name. He said he had spent more than a year in jail for being too vocal about poor conditions in the camp. He produces a letter detailing the abuses refugees have suffered.
“We don’t want to stay here,” agrees a 30-year-old fellow refugee, also from Kuta Palong.
Both say they fled human rights abuses by the Burmese military in northern Arakan State with the first wave of nearly 250,000 Rohingyas nearly 15 years ago. The two men will not return to Burma until they are granted full citizenship and are allowed to worship freely, they say. But it becomes clear that if these men are allowed to choose, they will stay in Bangladesh. Almost all of the other people in the camp feel the same, they say. Consequently, in the first quarter of 2006, UNHCR did not repatriate a single Rohingya refugee of the more than 20,000 officially registered in Bangladesh.
“The best durable solution in any refugee situation is always return, but it has to be voluntary, in safety and in dignity,” says Worrall. “At the moment these conditions don’t appear to be there.”
The only repatriations that have occurred are those of prisoners—mostly violators of immigration law—decided on a bilateral basis between Rangoon and Dhaka. Still the numbers are small—Burma has taken back just 247 people from Bangladeshi jails in the past 18 months, of which 90 were Muslim.
With the UNHCR repatriation program at a standstill, the organization has focused on improving conditions for the refugees in Chittagong, but it has faced numerous obstacles from the Bangladeshi authorities. Worrall’s office is still forbidden from offering education above primary level in the camps.
Similarly, none of the refugees are allowed to earn money inside or outside camp grounds, although in practice many pull rickshaws or do heavy manual work in the surrounding area, earning about 100 taka (US $1.47) a day, or about half what a Bangladeshi would make for the same task. The only official work program in the camps is a soap factory, a scheme designed to improve the refugees’ sense of self-worth, compensating workers with supplies such as rice.
While UNHCR and especially the refugees say the conditions are unacceptable and restrictive, average Bangladeshis see things differently. Upon hearing the Rohingya refugees complain about their conditions, Palash Barua, a 19-year-old student living close to Kuta Palong camp argues that his government has done more than enough: “There is little problem living here. They have educational and economic security.”
Barua’s attitude is not uncommon in Bangladesh. When the Rohingyas first fled Burma at the beginning of the 1990s, the Bangladeshi people were sympathetic to their plight, says Tasneem Khalil, a journalist at the Dhaka-based Daily Star newspaper. In the past few years, however, Bangladesh has become a victim of Islamic fundamentalism, the worst incident being 500 bomb blasts across Bangladesh on August 17, 2005, which killed three people and wounded scores of others.
Since then, the Rohingyas have suffered a major image problem. “These refugees are earning very disturbing and negative attention from the media,” Khalil says.
Khalil believes some refugees have links to terrorist groups—a claim substantiated by numerous other sources—but says it is unfair that the Bangladeshi media has branded all Rohingyas as terrorists. Khalil says this has worked in the Bangladeshi government’s favor as public opinion has shifted against the refugees, meaning few Bangladeshi people are now calling on Dhaka to allow the Rohingyas permanent resettlement.
In a post 9/11 world, allegations of terrorism are undermining hopes the refugees may have of being relocated to a third country. The US State Department maintains that Washington “will consider any individual cases referred by UNHCR, including Muslim Rohingyas,” though it knows of no current examples involving Rohingyas.
“No country wants to take Muslims,” says a worker in one of the Rohingya refugee camps who did not want to be identified. “There is no solution [to the Rohingya problem].”
The EC office in Dhaka said some European countries had made “very limited offers” to receive Rohingyas, without giving further details.
Back in the camps and even among the Buddhist Arakanese refugees in Chittagong Division, most still dream of the chance to start a new life in a third country. For many—including the 21-year-old man from Kuta Palong camp—one destination stands out in particular: “I want to go to America,” he says.
The Ministry of Food and Disaster Management—the department responsible for refugees in Bangladesh—did not respond to repeated requests for information for this article.
Arakan Disunited
Despite viewing the ruling junta as the common enemy, Arakan Rohingya Muslims and Buddhists both inside and outside Burma regard one another with deep suspicion, note observers. Both sides agree that the Burmese government is responsible for encouraging anti-Muslim feeling in a bid to secure the loyalty of Buddhists in Arakan, but this is one of the few areas of consensus.
Khaing San Lunn, acting president of the Arakan League for Democracy, a Buddhist group based in Dhaka, says the sympathy of Buddhists in exile for the plight of Arakan Muslim refugees in Bangladesh is tempered by their refusal to accept the idea of Rohingyas as a separate ethnic entity. “Before we get unity between so-called Rohingyas and us, we have no solution to this [refugee] problem.”
Khaing San Lunn says that Buddhists in exile have sympathy for the Rohingyas, but he still refuses to accept the Rohingya name. It must be dropped before agreement between the two sides can be reached, he argues.
Nurul Islam, the chairman of the Arakan Rohingya National Organization based in London, accuses the Buddhists of being unreasonable and undemocratic in their rejection of Rohingya ethnicity: “They should accept that Arakan is a diverse society,” he told The Irrawaddy. “The reality of Arakan is that we [Muslims and Buddhists] have lived together, we are still living [together] and we will be living until doomsday in the same place drinking the same water,” he adds. “We must peacefully co-exist.”
The Rohingyas say they can trace their presence in the region back to the 7th Century, but Buddhists dismiss this claim as a lie. Written historic evidence suggests that Muslim traders first reached the Arakanese coast in the 11th century, but it remains difficult to distinguish whether there is a Rohingya ethnic group separate to the Bangladeshi Muslims across the border. The line drawn down the Naff River by the departing colonial British split East Bengal (now Bangladesh) from Burma and politically separated people with a very similar culture and language, say observers.
Many Buddhists in Arakan have not forgotten efforts by extreme elements to annex Muslim areas of northern Arakan to East Bengal and what was then Pakistan following the Second World War and Britain’s division of India.
Source: http://www.irrawaddy.org/